In terms of the people and the land—their history, the economics of the area, the statistics, and the current situation—I have tried to be as accurate factually as possible.
DREAM COYOTE
The day I left Saskatoon for good, I had sold my house, abandoned a promising job teaching at the university as well as my nearly completed master’s degree, and said farewell to a circle of good women friends and to my mother and three of my four sisters and their families who lived there. I was both rather proud of my own daring and a little appalled at it; the image of a burning bridge was strong in my mind, and I stoked the flames gleefully, with a feeling close to triumph.
Although they said nothing, I knew both my friends and my family thought I was making a terrible mistake. Such is the prestige of a university job, the sense of those who make a life there as being the annointed, that my fellow graduate students and lecturers must have found my abdication from it very hard to understand. If my mother and sisters were collectively holding their breaths, not wanting to pass judgment and hoping against hope for the best, I knew my friends expected me to be back, newly divorced, in a year if not sooner, for marriage breakdown was happening all around us at the time—divorce, separation, reshuffling of couples, more split-ups, more divorces, more unhappiness.
And the truth was, in that first two or three years of my new life, I often said to myself that if I’d really understood what I was getting into, I’d never have done it, not realizing before I left that if my own family and friends had their private doubts about our marriage, the same was true of Peter’s family, his friends, even his hired man. In my new life I would have to learn to deal with, at the least, skeptical glances, and for every person who was welcoming, there would be no shortage of people who, though they ought to have been at least silent, if not kind, on the subject of my suitability as a wife for Peter were neither.
Peter had been born and had never lived anywhere else but on the remote family ranch in the Old Man On His Back range of hills, south of the Cypress Hills, and north of the peaked, purple line of the Bears Paw Mountains in Montana. Unlike most of the city men I knew, he didn’t nourish in secret bitterness unfulfilled dreams about another, better life; he loved his life as a cowboy-rancher and rural man. And, too, he was secure in his community, surrounded by men he’d gone to school with, cowboyed with, had good times with as far back as he could remember, who’d married and whose wives he’d known since childhood, and whose children were being raised into the same rural, agricultural world as their parents and grandparents and sometimes even great-grandparents had been.
Maybe it was his calmness, engendered by the deep sense of security stemming from a life lived all in one place, and of his sense of the rightness of his life that attracted me. But looking back, I see such a complicated mix of factors: the man, yes, but also the greenness and beauty of the landscape, and the smell of the air, the cool, sharp wind that swept away those things that in my city life I had thought were inevitable and unavoidable.
I first visited this place eighteen years ago on a twenty-fourth of May weekend when I drove down with my son, Sean. Peter had invited us months before, but I hadn’t wanted to come, thinking that a ranch held no attractions for me. Peter repeated the invitation and Sean, all boy, had been begging me to go, till I finally gave in. Through a mix-up about dates (the twenty-fourth of May weekend didn’t fall on the twenty-fourth that year), the day we arrived at the hay farm Peter was taken aback to see us. He and some other men were hard at work rounding up his cattle, sorting them, and loading them into huge trucks (called cattle liners) to haul them south to the ranch for the summer, since for a variety of reasons, including uncooperative weather, it was too late in the year to trail them on horseback the forty miles as he usually did. He explained to us that the cattle spend most of the year on the ranch, but winters they’re trailed to the hay farm in the Frenchman River valley where the supply of winter feed is grown. This is a more economical alternative to moving the feed to the cattle. Peter was embarrassed because he couldn’t leave his work to act the proper host and had to leave us pretty much to fend for ourselves.
I spent the entire day perched on the corral watching the men work. There is a snapshot of me sitting there, my hair well down below my shoulders, wearing jeans and a thick siwash-like sweater, which always reminds me of B.B. King since I bought it the same day I heard him perform at the Montreal Forum, in what was one of the highlights of my life (overshadowed only by the time in 1965 when I’d heard a young Bob Dylan perform in a half-empty Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver).
I was so fascinated by what I saw that the day flew by, even though all I did was sit and watch. Sean sat with me at first, but then he helped in the chute loading cattle into the trucks, and was nearly trampled by a steer when it backed down the chute, turned around, and was about to run over anybody who got in his way.
“Climb the corral! Climb the corral!” the men shouted at him, as Sean and the thousand-pound steer faced off and I watched, too dumb even to realize his life was, quite seriously, in danger, since the steer might avoid him, but more likely wouldn’t. Sean, twelve at the time, leaped to the side of the chute and scrambled up the corral rail with the agility that marked him as a young athlete, so that my heart swelled with pride. Later there was a branding, and Peter invited Sean to help wrestle calves, an invitation Sean eagerly accepted. When Peter teasingly invited me to do the same, I laughed and said no thanks.
I think now that if there hadn’t been that confusion about which weekend we were to arrive, and Peter had taken the days off to do as he usually did for visitors—drive them around the countryside, show them the ranch, saddle horses and take them for a ride—I would have said, Ho hum, gone away and never come back again. But the privilege of actually seeing the real work of the ranch and all the things that went with it had a different effect on me. I remember afterward laughingly telling my mother we’d spent the weekend in the middle of a Roy Rogers movie, but if I joked with her about it, and if Sean viewed it as an entertaining but not-to-be-repeated adventure which he soon forgot about, I was actually stirred so deeply that everything in my old life—friends, job, family, politics—paled beside it.
It wasn’t just the scenery or the novelty of everything that captivated me. I was struck also by how comfortable those men had seemed, how at ease they were in their work, and how unassuming and casual in their skill with the animals and with the tools they used to manage them. I was surprised to see they were actually enjoying themselves. They laughed, cracked jokes, kidded each other while they worked in the corral or on horseback, roped, or cut out cattle and chased them in. I was used to a world perpetually fraught with tension, with competitiveness so extreme at times as to seem really crazy, where the only constant was steady but, nonetheless, gut-wrenching change and the resulting mad scrabbling for position. As I sat on the rail watching and listening that day a new world was washing slowly over me, seeping in without my noticing, a slower world, and a timeless one that resonated with a sense that it must always have been there in just this way and always would be.
It had been an unusually wet spring, and although it wasn’t warm, the hills and grassy plains were as green and inviting as Ireland, so that my first look at the area was, to this extent, deceptive. As I look back to that weekend such a long time ago, when my world changed forever, the memory is dreamlike: the men riding their horses at a walk through the tall green grass and wildflowers on the riverbank, the wave of sloping green hills behind them, the clarity and the veracity of the light, in the lulls between wind gusts the music of birds, the splash of the shallow brown river running by below the corrals, the click of the cattles’ hooves, the cowboy ululations of the men.
I had never lived on a farm. Both my parents had come from farms, though: my mother from southern Manitoba and my father first from a farm near Magog, Quebec, and then from near St. Isidore de Bellevue, Saskatchewan, about seven miles from Batoche, the site of the Riel Reb
ellion in 1884–5, the trenches of which may still be seen, as well as the bullet holes in the little church. I have sometimes wondered if my father, who didn’t speak English himself till he learned it at school in Bellevue, had heard from his French-speaking teachers in that French community about Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont, and the battle fought just down the road from where they sat. Even though we have no Native blood that I know of, I do remember him mentioning Dumont more than once in a way that suggested the name and possibly the events were a part of his community’s folklore. In those days, around 1912, there would not have been Native children in school with him, although many of the children must have been Métis, since Batoche was the heart of the Métis community in the old Northwest. But all that is an aside. It was a farming community and the Le Blancs, too, having come as farmers to Acadia in mid-seventeenth century, were still farmers.
My sisters and I came from pioneering families on both sides: both sets of grandparents had homesteaded, as had our parents, so that “the homestead” was part of our basic vocabulary, a term we must have learned along with “mother,” “father” and “bread.” Our Irish-Canadian grandfather, Francis Graham, was even said to have been born under the wagonbox near Portage-la-Prairie, Manitoba, as his family trekked, in the early 1880s, from their home in Ontario to the West. Their original Manitoba farm was established in 1884, a Centennial Farm, a fact of which the family is inordinately, and justifiably, proud. On that side of the family our children are fifth-generation westerners.
This is how it was that my sisters and I grew up with the notion of the farm as a mythic paradise from which we had been expelled, by drought and bankers, and could never return. Basic as it was to us, though, having never lived on a farm much less a ranch, which belonged to some other tradition than our family’s, we viewed the notion as city dwellers do, quizzically, with a touch of apprehension, possibly even a little distaste.
In the years since the summer I turned thirteen and we moved to the city, I had become so urbanized that I knew nothing about farming, or about the daily life led by people who made their living in agriculture. I thought of myself proudly as a sophisticated city woman, but even that first weekend with Peter, strangely, I kept having flashes of déjà vu. They were incomplete, vague and unformed, and yet carried with them a puzzling tug of recognition, of memories that were more visceral even than images or fragments of conversations. Bewilderingly, I felt comfortable when I should have felt ill at ease; I felt at home when I should have felt lost. The can of evaporated milk on the table we used for our coffee, the orange offered me for dessert, the denseness of the air, the smell, the feeling of being close to the earth in the log house where we stayed were all just so to me; I felt transported to a familiar way of being and to a familiar place. Yes, I thought, and then, but how do I know this?
Gradually, over the year of our courtship, I began to remember what I had deliberately forgotten, how I had spent the first four years of my life in wilderness, living in log or hastily thrown together frame shacks in what we call the bush in northern Saskatchewan. I was conceived there, carried for nine months in my mother’s body there, knew no other place for those first formative years. My earliest memories are of nuggets of sunlight glinting off shoulder-high, damp emerald grass, of playing in the roots of trees, of the ephemeral, terrifying beauty of the northern lights, of the soul-stirring wail of timber wolves, of our mother setting coal oil lamps in windows to keep bears away, of mountains of snow and impassable, muddy or “corduroy” roads, boggy stretches which settlers covered with unpeeled slabs of trees for wagons or cars to bump over, and the richness of the texture, scent, the vibrant color of the air of northern Saskatchewan.
For a time my mother’s parents rented a farm somewhere north of Prince Albert or Nipawin: the feel of the hot sandy road on our bare feet as Cynthia, my older sister, and I whiled away the inter-minable summer afternoons while our grandparents napped, having been up since dawn, playing in our grandmother’s garden where with our cousins we built bowers and planted cities and made celebratory avenues out of plucked pinks, pansies, bachelor’s buttons and daisies, waiting for our mothers to come and collect us. And the violent northern storms where we sat indoors with our feet up off the floor as lightning cracked and thunder boomed all around the small log house, the swaying yellow lanterns, the feathery legs of our grandfather’s big work horses, their huge feet and their quiet steady air, our grandmother smiling and silent, as if meditating, as she sat moving the paddle of the butter churn up and down for hours in the kitchen, morning after morning spooning up the breakfast porridge from her blue willow bowls till the sad lovers and the weeping willow between them were revealed again.
In that setting at the hay farm, the color and feel of an orange in my hand, the can of milk on the table were suddenly freighted with meaning beyond the immediate circumstances, meaning that at first I could not quite decipher. I was now beginning to remember the early childhood I had chosen to forget as both valueless and unsuitable for the person I had been trying to become. As I remembered it, I began slowly to reclaim it in surprise and delight, for in this new context it was valued, something to be proud of, a treasury of meaning, facts, knowledge. I didn’t consciously think so at the time, but in some ways it began to seem that instead of coming to a new place, I had come home.
As time passed and I visited the hay farm occasionally, the rural setting with the Frenchman River running past the house, I remembered too the Saskatchewan River from a later time in my childhood when we’d lived in a village on its banks before the damming of it. I remembered the crash and roar of the ice going out in the spring, especially the spring it almost took the great black iron bridge with it, and our father (with the Mountie’s permission) bravely walking out onto it, just to feel the power of the river, I guess, as we waited, breathless and awestruck, on the bank for him either to be swept away forever or to return to us. The river’s great, wild presence came back to me, its spirit which hovered over it and around it and in it and which affected everyone who came near it touched me again; I could even recall its heavy, scented odor.
What I could remember about that natural world from which our family had been separated by so little was a combination of smells, the feel of the air, a sense of the presence of Nature as a living entity all around me. All of that had been deeply imprinted in me, but more in the blood and bone and muscles—an instinctive memory—than a precise memory of events or people. I remembered it with my body, or maybe I remembered it with another sense for which we have no name but is no less real for that. As I returned to the ranch and hay farm to visit, the sense of this memory grew; I found myself inexorably drawn to it although I did not understand this at the time, preferring to accept the obvious romantic scenario of marrying and living happily ever after.
If I could recover my powerful early connections with Nature, there was still the reality that as I became a town and then a city child, I had stopped thinking of Nature as people raised in it do and began to think of it as urban people do: as a place to holiday—the mountains, the seaside, a quiet lake somewhere in the country—as a place to acquire a suntan, have a summer romance, paint a picture of, enjoy a change of atmosphere. For a long period in my late teens and early twenties, I actively avoided picnics, complaining bitterly that they were stupid since there were always dirt and bugs and leaves in your food and insects to bite you, and although they were supposed to be a holiday, picnics were more work for us women than cooking a meal in the kitchen would be.
Besides, for a girl born in the bush into relative poverty who, for whatever reasons, had learned to aspire to a more glamorous lifestyle—at six, never having seen a dancer other than my father stepdancing late at night at a farmhouse party somewhere—I wanted to be a ballet dancer; I wanted to wear satin ballgowns, go to the theater, have movie stars for friends. I did not want to go back to the bush, a place so terrible that my mother, once we were gone from there, wouldn’t even speak of it. When I asked
about it when she was an old woman, she told me that she tried never to think of it, and on her deathbed, when I asked again, her response came in a distant whisper, her eyes dark and fixed on something I couldn’t see: “It was so cold…the wind was always blowing…in the morning…the men would…put on their things and go out…” She fell into silence and I regretted asking her, and yet I wanted to know, I truly wanted to know.
There was indeed a whole other story, a narrative, our family history transformed into our family mythology, which was what I had grown into since the other—the compelling, intense beauty of Nature and our lives lived in the midst of it—was never spoken of, never even conceived of in any concrete way in all the years since we’d left. Our father said nothing; our mother painted golden pictures of her girlhood on the prosperous farm in Manitoba, which I at least doubted, although I never dared say so. (And a good thing, too, because long after her death, when I paid my only visit there, I saw that they had all been true.) We had come from better things—land ownership and wealth, ancient heroism, blood links to the aristocracy in Ireland and Scotland—our fortunes had fallen, but we as people had not fallen with them, and consequently we did not dwell on the hardships, the misfortunes, the demeaning struggles for survival, refusing to accept them as anything more than temporary conditions to be met with courage and disdain.
Perfection of the Morning Page 2